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Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

bbc.com

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Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#231

Post by ShroudedNight »

renaudg wrote: post #220
annamargot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much volume are we talking here and how frequently would it need to be disposed of? I recall reading somewhere that it’s a very manageable amount.

Indeed. For example, the 9TWh required to power France's high speed train fleet for a year produce 200kg of nuclear waste. Since the beginning of the country's nuclear programme, the total cumulative volume is 3650m3 of waste : one olympic swimming pool's worth of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996751

What percentage of potential energy is extracted? My (old, probably out of date) understanding is that (at least in Canada) nuclear facilities limit themselves to extracting some tiny quantity of the potential energy in order to avoid producing material that could be made into nuclear weapons.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#232

Post by LilBytes »

Andys wrote: post #180
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like somebody needs to inform Australia that solar exists and they get a lot of sunlight.

This has been one of the worst times of the year for renewables - it has been cold, cloudy, rainy, and not very windy. Spot prices on the wholesale market apparently spiked to $12000

Where? Local to you perhaps but here in Queensland it's been amazing. That's a rather broad blanket statement for what is an entire continent.

He has a 13.5 KWh PowerWall and 5.2 KW of solar. He's barely used the grid in months and that's powering his Tesla 3 too.

We live on an entire continent.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#233

Post by ip26 »

heipei wrote: post #122
renaudg wrote: post #106

Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries : https://www.electricitymap.org/map As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about. This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany…

I don't know how any German in their right mind can continue supporting coal (especially lignite) even if you were to ignore all the fancy carbon emission calculations. Lignite is won using strip-mining here, and by here I mean in the most populous state of Germany between the major Ruhr area and Düsseldorf/Cologne, all major population centers. From where I live, I have to drive straight through these mines whenever…

I don't think anti-nuclear activists intend to support coal. They just don't consider what should replace the nuclear plants they wish to shutter.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#234

Post by ascotan »

"He says the plant now uses seven million tonnes of pellets sourced from commercial forests in the US a year"

How is this helping? Are we seriously chopping down forests in the US to feed UK power plants just so people can feel good about not burning coal?

Honestly I think most of 'environmentally friendly' options are just scams to make people feel better about themselves, but the costs of the 'green' option is just as bad or worse than the alternatives.

Bio fuels with ethanol sourced from corn comes to mind. It puts land under cultivation to produce the corn which is never taken into the discussion. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_against_ethanol_bad_...

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#235

Post by macspoofing »

Brakenshire wrote: post #193
macspoofing wrote: post #161

Serious question, Britain's energy mix is ~80% Nuclear/Hydro and 20% Wind/Solar/Other ('other' must be either natural gas or bio fuels, garbage or wood) ... Why even bother with wind and solar? Why not just do nuclear and hydro and be done with it. I've noticed anytime there's an article that talks about some country reaching 100% renewable energy it is always due to Hydro (and maybe Nuclear). Wind and solar are neve…

> Britain's energy mix is ~80% Nuclear/Hydro and 20% Wind/Solar/Other ('other' must be either natural gas or bio fuels, garbage or wood) That’s not even remotely true.

You're correct. I misread the caption in the artcle. Those are world numbers. The overall point holds. Britain uses a tremendous amount of wind but it forces it to rely on natural gas for base-load... why not just build out hydro and nuclear?

These are live numbers for my province: http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html

At the time of the posting, hydro and nuclear account for 75% (though I've seen it at levels of 90%+). And of course wind/natural gas are 9% and 13% respectively .. because they go hand in hand. Ontario could just buy hydro from Quebec and not even bother with solar and wind (and natural gas) and we could hit 100% renewable by this year instead of 2060 like Germany is planning. We're only building windmills because the population feels that they will a difference when we don't need them at all. What are we doing here? It's all insanity.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#236

Post by theptip »

ascotan wrote: post #234

"He says the plant now uses seven million tonnes of pellets sourced from commercial forests in the US a year" How is this helping? Are we seriously chopping down forests in the US to feed UK power plants just so people can feel good about not burning coal? Honestly I think most of 'environmentally friendly' options are just scams to make people feel better about themselves, but the costs of the 'green' option is just…

Trees are a renewable resource, if managed properly. Is there a particular concern about using forestry land to produce fuel?

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#237

Post by icebraining »

monadic2 wrote: post #210
torpfactory wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wood pellet burning is a temporary distraction and distortion caused by regulation that allows it to be counted as "renewable". I believe you can make a reasonable argument wood burning is carbon neutral. Unfortunately, land used for growing forests of fuel represents a terrible opportunity cost - you could grow food or let the forests absorb atmospheric carbon, provide animal habitat, re-wilding, etc. However, there…

Do we have carbon neutral batteries yet? Last I saw the production chain for lithium-ion was not carbon neutral over the expected lifetime of the product but rather increased carbon emissions. I’m having a hard time finding numbers to compare with wood pellets or coal, though, so I’m curious if you know.

How could a battery be carbon-neutral? What does that even mean? A batter doesn't produce energy, how could it be carbon-neutral by itself?

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#238

Post by pfdietz »

glogla wrote: post #138
Ma8ee wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining and transport of uranium ore, processed fuel and nuclear waste. I don’t know how significant those are. My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.

> My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy. That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel. Only, we're not building them. B…

> Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.

No, we're not building them because they are more expensive than ordinary LWRs, uranium is cheap, and separated plutonium from spent fuel has negative value.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#239

Post by ascotan »

theptip wrote: post #236
ascotan wrote: post #234

"He says the plant now uses seven million tonnes of pellets sourced from commercial forests in the US a year" How is this helping? Are we seriously chopping down forests in the US to feed UK power plants just so people can feel good about not burning coal? Honestly I think most of 'environmentally friendly' options are just scams to make people feel better about themselves, but the costs of the 'green' option is just…

Trees are a renewable resource, if managed properly. Is there a particular concern about using forestry land to produce fuel?

I think having potentially foreign-owned interests coming into the US to buy up land for commercial logging in order to feed non-coal burning plants is not a net positive.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#240

Post by caf »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143
renaudg wrote: post #106

Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries : https://www.electricitymap.org/map As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about. This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany…

It looks like somebody needs to inform Australia that solar exists and they get a lot of sunlight.

electricitymap's feed for distributed solar in Australia seems to be inoperable at the moment. Eg APVI's live map currently shows over 1GW in QLD of distributed PV generation.

electricitymap uses http://pv-map.apvi.org.au/data for this feed (https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/maste...) but that source now 404s.

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